pic: Offseason 8W Tank Drive

[EricH]

Originally Posted by 75vs1885

But bending two pieces exactly the same could be difficult if a team doesn't have access to the necessary resources to make an EXACT copy, that why I'd opt for box or channel all around

And those resources are a break, a shear, and a good set of measuring instruments, particularly when you're just bending yourself a C-channel. If a team is designing in sheet at all, for a component as major as the drivetrain, and doesn't have those resources at their disposal, they really need to be rethinking their design. But if they DO have those, which they probably do, then they could bend two, three, four, as many pieces as they needed to in order to build their robot and its twin if they were building one of those.

[Knufire]

Our primary choice would be to find a sheet metal sponsor to fabricate the piece for us. We do have access to a waterjet and a break, however, the cutting area on the waterjet is too small to manufacture the piece and the manual break is of rather low quality.

If we can't find a waterjet sponsor, we'll split the single sheet metal piece up into 4 (two end sheets and a two piece bellypan) so that they'll fit on the waterjet and bend the c-channels ourselves.

If we're unsuccessful at bending the end sheets ourselves AND finding a waterjet sponsor AND still want to use this drive during next build season, we'll probably just purchase the end sheets from the 2015 kitbot.